WITNESSING a band lock into a run of form live is always something to behold. With musicians of the calibre of the late Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, it always threatened to be quite a show, and so it proved.

This version of the Magic Band has been touring since 2009, when Eric Klerks replaced guitarist Gary Lucas. Filling the dead man’s vocal shoes is John ‘Drumbo’ French, the original drummer. French is no tribute act, but able to inhabit the warped blues of Beefheart with an intensity of his own.

Fortunately for all bar the most devoted, the Magic Band chose their two hour set with care, sampling from some of the more accessible reaches of their back catalogue.

Electricity from Safe As Milk was a clear audience favourite. If some of the instrumentals veered towards the Allman Brothers, it was perhaps the only time the band sounded remotely like anyone else.

The original line-up was famously held near captive by the domineering Don Van Vliet for more than eight months while they learned the critically adored but resolutely un-commercial Trout Mask Replica. Today he would probably have received an ASBO.

A song written during that fraught period, as the band sat out a rainstorm that felled trees all around them, which was then left unrecorded for nearly 40 years, was the standout in the outstanding second set. It perfectly captured the tension, menace and visceral power of the Magic Band; a potent concoction that few have come close to emulating since.